Abstract
Redundant materials in germplasm collections cause hurdles in gene bank management. Present study was conducted to analyze redundancies using Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs) and to evaluate genetic diversity of barley germplasm comprising of 404 Hordeum vulgare landraces belonging to 8 different regions (Pakistan. India, Iran, Nepal, Iraq, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan Kazakhstan). In total 50 alleles were detected. Number of alleles observed was highest for Bmag0023 (11) followed by HVLOX (9), HVM54 (8), Bmag0382 (7), Bmag0500 (5), Bmag0490 (5) and HVID (5) locus. Allele size range was largest for HVLOX while it was lowest for Bmag0500. Allele frequencies were found highest for allele HVM54-120 (0.39) followed by HVID-80 (0.38) and Bmag0382-66 (0.35). Core collection for the barley germplasm comprised of 42 patterns including 14 unique and 28 frequent patterns. The number of patterns observed in landraces of different regions was in the order of Pakistan> India> Nepal> Turkmenistan> Iraq> Iran> Uzbekistan> Kazakhstan. These patterns were clearly clustered into two groups using Jaccard's cluster analysis (group A and group B). Principal Component Analysis (PCA) also distributes these patterns into three groups. The overall results revealed that differentiation of patterns using Jaccard's cluster analysis was in accordance with PCA which revealed that these patterns were distributed with respect to their geographic regions. Furthermore, it was concluded that development of core collection is the one strategy besides other strategies to reduce redundancies in gene bank management and make the handling of germplasm easier.